ZEMAX Users' Knowledge Base - Articles - Polarization and Thin Film Coatings

What Are The S and P Polarization States?

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Question: What are the S and P polarization states, and how do I enter a beam that is s-polarized?

How to Use the Jones Matrix Surface

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 PDT

The Jones matrix surface is a simple way to define polarizing components. This article provides some examples of its use.

How To Model Corner-Cube Retroreflectors

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 PDT

Corner Cube retroreflectors are commonly used in a wide range of optical systems. This article describes various different ways in which these components can be modeled in ZEMAX. The treatment can be as detailed as the user needs, with effects due to face misalignment, roofline straddling, thin-film coatings, diffraction etc included as required.

How is a MIRROR Without a Coating Handled?

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 PST

Question: I have a MIRROR surface or object, but I have not defined a coating for it. How is its reflectivity accounted for?

How To Model a Dichroic Beam Splitter

no@spam.com (Andrew Locke) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 PDT

This article explains:

How dichroic beam splitters can be modeled in non-sequential mode
How to use the flexible table coating format which is useful when the coating prescription data is not available

What Are The Ray And Field Coefficients in the Coatings Calculation?

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 PDT

Question: When doing polarization ray-tracing through thin-film coatings, ZEMAX reports reflection, transmission and phase data using "ray" and "field" coefficients. What are these, how are they different, and which one should I use?

Modeling Frustrated Total Internal Reflection in Non-Sequential Mode

no@spam.com (Mike Tocci) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 PDT

This article describes how to model evanescent field effects like frustrated total internal reflection in ZEMAX. This is useful in applications like fingerprint scanners.

How to Add Coating and Scattering Functions to Non-Sequential Objects

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:00:00 PDT

Non-sequential objects are 3D volumes. Thin-film coatings, and scattering functions, are surface properties of these 3D volumes. This article explains:

The concept of the "face number" of an object
How thin-film coatings and scattering functions are applied to the various faces of an object
Special issues involved in applying these properties to CAD objects

How To Model a Partially Reflective and Partially Scattering Surface

no@spam.com (Dan Hill) — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 PST

This article describes how to model a partially reflective surface which diffusely scatters a fraction of incident energy into a specific distribution.

How To Design Birefringent Polarizers

no@spam.com (Mark Nicholson) — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:00:00 PDT

This article explains:

What birefringence is
How ZEMAX models birefringence
How to model a two-crystal birefringent polarizer
How to compute the extinction ratio of the polarizer for a general ray

The article is accompanied by a ZIP archive containing the samples used and a macro. This can be downloaded from the final page of the article.

This article is also available in Japanese.